BlackBerry DevCon – San Francisco October 18-20, 2011
While RIM is growing in absolute numbers, in relative terms BlackBerry faces tough times due to the competition of iOS and Android. We visited the BlackBerry DevCon with high hopes of great and radical new decisions – and of course to present Glaze UI, our new BlackBerry native UI framework. Radical news we received indeed – continue to read why the DevCon has frustrated many BlackBerry developers and how we see it.
Ischa Freimaak: Fun @ Enough Software
Every autumn there is the "Freimarkt" in our hometown Bremen - a funfair that has a 976 year old tradition.
Nokia Windows Phone Training Berlin 2011
At the beginning of this year Microsoft and Nokia have joined to push Windows Phone as a platform and to provide Nokia with a new smartphone OS that enables them to take back some of the lost market share in the area of high-end phones. Several months later, on 4th of October Nokia hosted a Windows Phone Training with Robert Miles and Andy Wigley to give developers an overview of the features and techniques of Windows Phone 7.
At the Motodev AppSummit 2011 Berlin
The Ritz - Carlton: made from Portuguese sandstone, it rises in to the Berlin sky. Filled with mahogany and millionaires, it's one of the premier hotels in the city. On the 11th of April 2011, the second level was filled with a rather unusual crowd. Its the Motodev AppSummit 2011. With the crowd were Marco and Andre.
Mobile TechCon Spring Edition
This conference was held for the first time last autumn in Mainz. Since it was quite a success, the organizers decided to run the show again in 2011 - even twice: One spring and one autumn edition. The general concept is to combine developer workshops with a conference and an exhibition during three days.
This time, it took place in Munich, in the Westin Grand Hotel and Enough Software went there with three guys: Ricky (developer + project manager), Olly (lead developer) and Marco (PR + Sales). We decided to skip the workshops on the first day and focus on the conference and exhibition instead which started on day 2.
Impressions from the Droidcon 2011
As every year, the Droidcon 2011 was held in our capitol city of Berlin. Thus Ricky, Tobias and Andre of our team took off from Bremen to visit.
The Urania, a well-known theater, was the location of this year's conference which was a nice contrast to last years location which was far from the center of Berlin. With its classy red-padded chairs and theatre stages the feeling was much more of a show than of a conference. The Droidcon started on the first day with the barcamp. Everyone was invited to give a half-hour session or discussion of their taste. After an introduction of the team from OpenIntents which is organizing the conference each year, an introduction of each participant of the conference was held. Although a chosen speaker introduced himself and his left and right seat partner with tag words, this process really took a lot of time as several hundred people attended the kickoff. The introduction of the bar camp presenters followed: a wide range of topics was presented and (unlike other bar camps) each and every session got a room fitting to the overall interest in the presented topic. Due to conflicting interests the Enough Software team parted their way to enjoy the sessions.
Useful iOS Libraries and Classes
Unless you suffer from Not Invented Here Syndrome, you most likely enjoy using open source iOS code that other developers share via github (or other places) as much as I do. Whenever I see a useful new piece of code, be it a whole library or just a simple class, I immediately want to check out how it works and begin to think about how and where I can use it in an actual project. In other cases, I have a particular problem that I need a solution for and I may check to see whether I can find something suitable which already solved that particular problem. Then there's also the case where I develop a solution and open-source it for everyone to use.
Over the past few weeks, I compiled a list of what I think are useful and/or interesting open source iOS libraries/classes, focussing solely on components that provide some sort of drop-in UI and leaving out anything that doesn't require linking against UIKit. If there is enough interest, I may write another blog post on non-UI components in the future.
So, without further ado, here are some components that can be useful in one of your next iOS projects, or which you simply might find interesting to play around with. Some of these are well known, but hopefully you'll find something you didn't know existed.
A personal look back to CTIA
Those of you who expect to read about “trailblazing new solutions” or the “future of the mobile ecosystem” in this blog entry: Stop reading right away and check out those blogs you already have bookmarked in your browser. You will learn more there. This is rather a very personal summary of our trip to San Francisco and what happened around it. Of course we will also tell you what kind of sessions and keynotes we attended, but since we had a booth ourselves, we did not attend that many.
All the Qt news from the Nokia Developer Summit (NDS 2010)!
Since I won a ticket for Nokia's annual developer conference Nokia Developer Summit (Thanks to Wip Connector!).
Let me share my thoughts about the summit!, and especially on the stream I attended dedicated to Qt development and development in Qt 
Seat down and go through the content of the 2 days of conference seating comfortably in front of your computer!
Nokia Developer Summit 2010 – Technical Stream 1: Qt SDK
“Nokia is back” was the message Nokia spread at the opening key notes of the Nokia World and Nokia Developer Summit (NDS) 2010 in London. But this statement not only referred to the new devices Nokia introduced to the public in the last couple of months and of course the brand new ones they presented here at the Nokia World. A big deal of this statement also referred to Nokia's new Qt SDK which Nokia branded under a well known credo only put in different words: “Code less, create more, deploy anywhere”.
Droidcon 2010
Droidcon 2010 took place in Berlin, on May 26 and May 27. Five of us attended the first day of the conference (Robert, Andre, Ricky, Marcel and myself), while only me and Robert attended the second day. The following are my impressions on the event.